


decipher

by bearonthecouch



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003), Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence (technically), Alternate Universe - Fullmetal Alchemist 2003/Brotherhood Fusion (technically), Codes & Ciphers, Friendship, Gen, Mentor Maes Hughes, Military, Missing/Alternate Scene, Orders, Parental Maes Hughes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-29 15:56:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17206385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bearonthecouch/pseuds/bearonthecouch
Summary: Colonel Mustang found Ed crying, broken, huddled in the rain and with even Al unable to comfort him, mourning the death of his own childhood. Eventually someone else came along: Lieutenant Colonel Hughes.





	decipher

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place within ep. 8 of the 2003 anime, wherein Ed's first official military assignment is going through all Shou Tucker's research. 
> 
> Assumes a lot of Brotherhood backstory with regards to Mustang and Hughes including their respective ranks (which are higher than at this point in the 2003 show). 
> 
> Some headcanon applies.

There is a sharply drawn line that separates Edward Elric's childhood from whatever he is now. He remembers playing games with Winry and Al, but that all stopped after his failed attempt at bringing their mother back to life ripped away Al's body. He had to focus. He had to get Al's body back. He couldn't let his little brother be trapped in that suit of armor for one second longer than necessary.

Winry tried to distract him from the intense pain and overwhelming frustration of his accelerated rehab after she and Granny saved his life and gave him automail. But he wouldn't let himself play marbles or cards or draw pictures with colored chalk the way he used to. Even when Winry tried to disguise the childhood games as being important to his therapy. Eventually she stopped asking, and though both of them knew he was pushing himself too hard, he would not ever admit it. No matter what threats Winry made. He had a promise to keep: one year.

On October 3, he and Al burned down their house and climbed onto a train, and Ed's childhood was left even further behind. He still had Colonel Roy Mustang's card in his pocket, but all it said for a location was “Eastern Headquarters,” which is huge, and the woman in a military uniform sitting behind the desk looked at him and saw a child, and didn't believe he had any legitimate reason to visit with a high-ranking officer. It was only when Ed threatened to open every door in the place and find the colonel by himself that the secretary sighed heavily and picked up the phone. A very long five minutes later, Colonel Mustang came down the stairs, looking somewhat surprised. Ed glared at him, waiting for him to say something. “You might as well come up to my office,” is what he said.

Once he situated Ed and Al on the couch, he leaned against his desk across from them, arms crossed over his chest and looking at Ed with that same deep, dark gaze he'd had that day in Resembool. “You really want to do this?” he asked, and he made in sound almost like accusation, like Ed was doing something wrong. Ed scowled. “ _You said_ I could become a State Alchemist,” he said, stressing the point that this was all the military officer's idea.

“I think you can. But the State Alchemist Exam isn't easy.”

Ed shrugged. Nothing about his life has been easy since his mother died.

Mustang took him and Al to Central City, engaging them in conversations about alchemy for most of the trip. It took Ed less than an hour to notice that the colonel only answered a fraction of the questions he was asked, and that he nearly always deflected the conversation back toward the Elric brothers. But he seemed genuinely interested in hearing Ed and Al's theories. Although Ed held back some things, too.

There were seven days to spend in Central before the exam, days that Ed and Al spent researching and studying in Shou Tucker's house. And Mr. Tucker's daughter, Nina, overpowered Ed's aversion to play, for at least a few days. He laughed and ran and chased and made funny faces and _remembered_ what it was like to be a child. _I'm only eleven_ , he thought, as he lay down in the grass next to Nina and her giant dog, looking up at the clouds. _I'm only eleven, and that isn't grown-up at all._

Then Mr. Tucker turned Nina and Alexander into a chimera, and all three of them wound up dead. And the door to Edward's childhood slammed shut, and there was no going back. He shut down in a way he hadn't even when he was bleeding out and fighting through the agonizing pain of losing two limbs, because then he was focused on Al, on doing whatever he had to, on keeping his brother alive.

Colonel Mustang found him crying, broken, huddled in the rain and with even Al unable to comfort him, mourning the death of his own childhood. Eventually someone else came along: Lieutenant Colonel Hughes, who gently interrogated him about what happened. And when he was forced to recount what alchemy had wrought, Ed couldn't get Mustang's question out of his head: _“Do you really want to do this?”_ But he had to. There was no question. Everything he did was for Al. He held his brand new pocketwatch in his hand and traced his thumb over the Amestrian dragon on the cover, and he wanted to quit, but he knew that he couldn't.

Hughes took Ed and Al home, and Ed felt lethargic and unmotivated, sleepy in a way that reminded him of the early days after automail surgery when he'd been pulled under by morphine. Al left him alone, for the most part. But Lieutenant Colonel Hughes was not so easily pushed away. He dropped onto the couch where Ed was sitting, and he sipped from a beer bottle every now and then and tried to make it look like he had nothing better to do than comfort a traumatized barely twelve-year-old. In reality, he had a newborn daughter and an active investigation. But he gave Edward his full attention.

“Mustang says you're pretty good at alchemy,” he said simply, as if he wasn't aware that Ed was the youngest State Alchemist in history. Ed nodded, because he was pretty good at alchemy and he knew it. But he was also keenly aware of what alchemy took in the name of equivalent exchange, and what alchemy ripped apart and destroyed. He didn't tell Hughes that he could transmute without a circle. Hughes wasn't an alchemist, anyway; he wouldn't fully grasp what that meant.

Hughes frowned, his eyebrows furrowing as he studied Ed. He put his hand on the boy's shoulder and it took everything Ed had in him not to flinch away. “I've seen grown men struggle after seeing horrible things like what you've just seen.” When Ed didn't say anything, he continued, sighing and looking down at his leg, tapping up and down restlessly, in some exact way that Ed read like a goddamn book. He knew that Hughes wasn't just talking about watching other people struggle, second or third-hand. Ed wondered how a person who obviously had shit like Shou Tucker and maybe even worse haunting his memories could have such an easy smile.

Hughes' eyes dropped to the pocket that contained Ed's pocketwatch, and he winced like it hurt him to see it. “Look kid,” he said, letting his eyes meet Ed's once more. “The military as a whole isn't kind to people who can't or won't follow orders, but you can always talk to me. Or Roy - Colonel Mustang. I know you may not believe me, but he is a good man.”

“He's making me compile Tucker's research! That... man,” Ed was breathing heavily, his chest heaved as his rage once again threatened to overtake him. Shou Tucker didn't even deserve to be called a human being! “He killed his own wife! And his _daughter_!” Tears threatened to spill again, but Ed wouldn't let them fall. “We should burn everything he touched,” he growled, once he had calmed down enough to at least look at Hughes again.

The investigations officer did at least look sympathetic when he said “The orders come from above him, you know. You're accountable to the entire chain of command, all the way up to the Fuhrer himself.” He shook his head, and finished off his beer. “But they should never have conscripted a child in the first place.”

Ed shrugged. He knew he wasn't a child. But maybe Hughes was a little bit right. Colonel Mustang had already told him that he was a dog of the military now, but Ed hadn't stopped to think about the fact that being part of the military didn't just mean getting access to better research materials; it also meant following orders he didn't want to follow.

His eyes flickered toward Hughes, and he sighed the heavy sigh of an old man, and he got to his feet, suddenly energized not by desire to do anything, but by cold, unshakable determination. Whatever it took to get Al's body back. All of this was his penance, and it would never be enough.

One morning after another, he organized the meticulously kept notebooks that belied the friendly, scattershot persona Shou Tucker had fooled him with, while Brigadier General Grand looked on with jealous curiosity. Grand was an alchemist too, but Ed didn't trust anyone who wanted to use Tucker's research for any reason. Most of Tucker's paper trail was coded – most alchemical research of any kind was coded – but Ed rarely bothered to write down what he knew, and his father's journals were exactly what they appeared to be, and perfectly readable to anyone fluent in Xerxian. Ed was not, obviously; he didn't even know what language he was looking at, but he'd never needed Hohenheim to help him learn alchemy. So Ed really had no experience with brute-forcing another alchemist's secret notes.

Cracking Tucker's code without a cipher felt like a lot of work for something he didn't even want. But those were the orders he was given. And Al couldn't even help him because the whole case and all associated evidence was classified. It was a cover-up. And Ed wanted nothing more than to scream to the whole country about what Shou Tucker had done, but he knew no one would believe him. Most people didn't know anything about alchemy, and wanted nothing to do with it except as a miraculous solution to their problems. And if he went out divulging military secrets, well... he could get shot.

So he sat in the Investigations Department's evidence locker and punched the wall with his automail fist, until the futility of that sent him sliding to the floor, arms crossed over his kneees and head down atop them. He wasn't sure how long he sat there like that, minutes or hours, but no one came to check up on him. And eventually, he drew in a deep and shaky breath, and got to work.

If he looked at the cipher problem as a puzzle to solve, and didn't think about the information it contained, then it became an interesting challenge. He wished, yet again, that he had Al with him. Al always helped him get his thoughts in order.

Ed's head snapped up, many hours later, as the door to the windowless room was pushed open. It wasn't Al, obviously. But it wasn't the Iron Blood Alchemist either. He frowned. “Mister Hughes?”

“I thought you might need some help.” Maes Hughes strolled over, still unbelievably casual, and picked up a stack of Ed's scribbled notes and dead-end attempts at decoding Tucker's research. He chewed on his lower lip and mumbled to himself for almost a full minute. “You've made some good progress here,” he finally said.

Ed just stared at him, no less confused by the compliment than he was by the lieutenant colonel's sudden presence in the room in the first place. “I thought you were like... a police officer?”

“I am now. I was an analyst first.” Hughes hopped up onto the rickety table that strained to hold his weight. He rifled through the papers in his hand. “Technically, everything a State Alchemist does belongs to the military. They're not supposed to be allowed to use any kind of cipher without telling us exactly how to decrypt it. For exactly this reason.”

Ed raised an eyebrow. “You're planning for State Alchemists to get murdered?”

“It's the military. 'Proper planning and preparation yadda yadda.' And after Ishval, well... it suddenly felt a lot more possible for a State Alchemist to die. You're not invincible.”

“I know that.”

Hughes cleaned his glasses on his shirt, replaced them, and looked, very obviously, at Ed's metal arm. He blew out a breath. “Yeah. I guess you do.”

He slipped off the table and deposited himself in the chair Ed had been using. His brow furrowed as he worked the numbers, substitution patterns and algorithms, spinning the alphabet on a hand-drawn wheel. Circles within circles. An alchemist would feel right at home.

Ed watched him, but there wasn't much to see, really. Every now and then, Hughes would scratch a new letter onto his copy paper and run the numbers again.

After more than an hour of this, Ed asked the question that had been nagging at him: “If you're so good at this, why can't _you_ compile Tucker's research?”

But Hughes shook his head before the brand-new Fullmetal Alchemist even finished asking the question. “No way. I'm not an alchemist. None of this makes any sense to me.”

As if to prove it, he slid a hefty pile of papers across the desk toward Ed. There is math there that is nothing like the math Hughes knows: alchemic symbols creating intricate equations, geometry that can manipulate matter itself. Ed frowned down at the diagrams and circles, traced the shapes with his flesh and blood finger, recognized scattered ancient words, some in Latin and some in languages he can't even identify. He found marks that held meaning: “soul,” “air,” “body.”

“Does that look familiar?”

He looked up at Hughes, and then swallowed hard before nodding. “Yeah,” he admitted, very softly. He squeezed his eyes shut against the memories: some of those symbols are so close – _too_ close – to the soul bond traced in blood inside his brother's body.

He didn't realize he was trembling until he felt Hughes' hand on his shoulder.

“Let's take a break, kid,” Maes said gently. The lieutenant colonel steered Ed to a small office that held a coffee pot, which he immediately turned on, and then he rummaged around in a desk drawer until he found a bundle wrapped in a paper napkin. “Banana bread,” he said, setting it in front of Ed. “From my wife.” When Ed made no move to take a piece, Maes smiled and took one for himself. “If you don't eat any, my Gracia might take it as an insult.”

Ed couldn't even remember the last time he'd eaten something. At Maes' not-subtle urging, he ate half the small loaf of bread. It wasn't a meal, but it was enough to quiet the growling in his stomach. Maes poured coffee for both of them, which Ed could barely tolerate because apparently military people only ever drink black coffee. Extremely bitter black coffee. He swallowed a mouthful or two and waited for Hughes to take him back to the evidence room, but the man didn't seem in any hurry to return.

“Colonel Mustang said sometimes alchemy's too dangerous,” Ed finally said. It was a plea, a last desperate hope. “Sometimes it has to be destroyed so no one else will ever get hurt.”

“Yeah, he'd know,” Maes sighed. “He'd also know that you'd lose your right to ever practice alchemy again, and might even go to jail, if you got caught doing something like that.”

“Something dangerous?”

“Something like destroying government property.” He slid a folded-up piece of paper, his improvised alpha-numeric cipher, across the table. “Better get back to work.”

* * * *

Even with Hughes' help, even with the encryption mostly cracked, it took Ed weeks to decode, compile, and make sense of Tucker's research. And it sickened him, truly, physically, so that the only reason he ate or slept was because Hughes practically kidnapped him and forced him to. But the nights he spent in the lieutenant colonel's home were also the only time he got to spend with Al, so he never protested.

And he knew his brother was worried, and he asked questions sometimes, but mostly Ed just shrugged, dull-eyed, and said “I'm in the military now. This is how it's gonna be, I guess.”

But Mustang had promised him so much more. The colonel had offered him hope, a chance at a future. How was he supposed to get Al's body back when he was stuck in an almost prison cell all the time?

And still, there was temptation: nagging whispers, words tugging at him here and there through the long hours. He locked on to any thread of hope he could find as he swam through years of Tucker's research. Many of the theories were sparked way before the man ever became a State Alchemist. (And Nina's voice still echoed in Ed's head: “Play with me, Big Brother Ed”).

Shou Tucker knew how to combine two living bodies into one, with at least some of the human's soul still anchored to its new form, even if it was damaged. Ed can tether a soul to an object, in the absence of a body. Somewhere in the combination of their knowledge there has to be _something_ Ed can use. He almost threw up at just the thought that he might use it.

The door opened, spilling brighter hall light into the dimly lit room that was never meant to be a long-term workspace. “Hughes, I don't feel like it,” Ed insisted, without even looking up.

“Fullmetal.” The voice was deeper than Hughes', and familiar.  
  
“Colonel.” Ed turned around so he could look his nominal commanding officer in the eye. In practice, he'd barely spent any time with Roy Mustang since passing the Alchemist Exam. “I did what you wanted,” he announced, waving his hand around the neatly organized stacks of papers and handwritten notes to prove it.

“I know. I've got a new assignment for you.”

Ed's stomach flipped. He didn't bother to hide his suspicion as he asked “What new assignment?”

Mustang handed him a packet of papers: official military orders, with the Amestrian dragon ink-stamped atop the typewritten words. Ed scanned the paper. “Youswell?” His eyes flickered up to Mustang.

“It should be a simple trip. Less than a week, in and out.”  
  
“Okay,” Ed agreed. Not that he had any other choice. But he was taking Al with him. For _sure_. He wouldn't even risk asking for permission, he'd just do it. He pushed his way past Colonel Mustang, down the long corridors of Central Command, out into the bright streets of the city. The train tickets that came along with his orders had them leaving the very next day. He had one last dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Hughes and their baby, one more night staying up late talking to Al before the two brothers boarded the waiting train in the early hours of the morning.  
  
He'd be lying if he said it didn't feel good to get away from the claustrophobic evidence locker and the written remnants of Shou Tucker's twisted mind.

* * * *

Two men in military uniform stood on the platform, watching the train depart.

“I'm not sure if I think you're brilliant for getting him out of the viper's nest, or worried that you've sent a twelve-year-old soldier into the volatile Eastern Region without any practical sort of backup.”

“It's a _mine inspection_ , Hughes. What could go wrong?”

Maes instantly thought of at least five things that could go wrong, and he wasn't even particularly trying. But Mustang's doing his best.

“When's he s'posed to get back?”

“I dunno," Roy said with a smile. "You know how kids like that get sidetracked.”

Maes grinned, and shook his head, and walked with Mustang back to headquarters. “Well. You tell him I've got a meal waiting for him – for _both_ of you – whenever he does get back.”  
  
“Sure thing,” Roy agreed, instantly.

When he dropped Hughes off at his small office, he pretended not to notice that a couple of snapshots of Ed and Al were mixed in with the dozens of little Elicia scattered across his desk.

 


End file.
